Comment on Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant

Abstract

Martin Heidegger interprets Kant’s well-known question in the Critique of Pure Reason: “Was darf ich hoffen?” (“What may I hope?”) in one sentence, in which the verb “hoffen” (to hope) is circumscribed with the noun “Erwartung” (expectation).

The paper attempts to show that this paraphrastic form of interpretation is not justified by virtue of the nature of the word material in the Critique of Pure Reason.

This is done in the following ways:

• (1) through a comparison of the frequency distribution of the word complexes “Choffen/Hoffnung” (to hope/hope) and “erwarten/Erwartung” (to expect/expectation);

• (2) through a syntactic analysis of those sentences and clauses in which these word complexes occur;

• (3) through a context analysis of these word pairs;

• (4) through a semantic analysis of two sentences in which “Hoffnung” and “Erwartung” in the one case and “Erwartungen” and “hoffen” in the other occur in noticeable semantic opposition.

The possibility of formalizing such an analysis for the computer is touched on.

This paper is printed in full (in German) in Untersuchungen zur Sprache Kants(IPK-Forschungsberichte Bd. 26, Helmut Buske Verlag, Hamburg, 1970). pp. 181–191.